Queer Presence in Post Modern Horror Films
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Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Theses Department of English 7-17-2009 Where I am, There (Sh)it will be: Queer Presence in Post Modern Horror Films Melanie McDougald Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_theses Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation McDougald, Melanie, "Where I am, There (Sh)it will be: Queer Presence in Post Modern Horror Films." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2009. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_theses/66 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WHERE I AM, THERE (SH)IT WILL BE: QUEER PRESENCE IN POST MODERN HORROR FILMS by MELANIE MCDOUGALD Under the Direction of Margaret Mills Harper ABSTRACT This paper will consider the function of queer space and presence in the post modern horror film genre. Beginning with George Romero‟s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead and continuing through to contemporary examples of the genre, the paper posits the function of the queer monster or monstrous as integral to and representative of the genre as a whole. The paper analyzes both the current theory and scholarship of the genre and through Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and queer theory offers a theory of how these theories can add to existing theory and scholarship. INDEX WORDS: Post modern horror film, Queer theory, Psychoanalytic theory, Lacan, Slasher films, Zombie films, Neo-slasher films WHERE I AM, THERE (SH)IT WILL BE: QUEER PRESENCE IN POST MODERN HORROR FILMS by MELANIE MCDOUGALD A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2009 Copyright by Melanie McDougald 2009 WHERE I AM, THERE SH(IT) WILL BE: QUEER PRESENCE IN POST MODERN HORROR FILMS By MELANIE MCDOUGALD Committee Chair: Margaret Mills Harper Committee: Mary Hocks Calvin Thomas Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University August 2009 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks to all my support people, but most of all to Peter Fontaine for all those late night horror film marathons, and for being brave enough to get in his car after. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1 2. THE SLASHER FILM 14 3. THE ZOMBIE FILM 26 4. THE NEO-SLASHER AND THE REMAKES 32 5. CONCLUSION 38 WORKS CITED 41 FILMOGRAPHY 43 1 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION “Ask any horror fans, and they will tell you that American horror film is in a slump.” Steffen Hantke “Academic Film Criticism, the rhetoric of Crisis, and the Current State of American Horror Cinema: Thoughts on Canonicity and Academic Anxiety” Noel Carroll‟s “Why Horror?”, originally published in 1990, poses a question: if horror is about what terrifies or repulses us, “how can we explain its very existence, for why would anyone want to be horrified, or even art-horrified?” (33); (perhaps especially) given the current state and output of American horror, this is a trenchant question. Stephen Hantke‟s article focuses explicitly upon the scholarly and critical anxiety that the genre itself, and recent additions to that genre, produce. Part of that anxiety circulates around whether or not “classic” post modern horror is capable of sustaining critical interrogation and attention; the general abandonment of subversive explorations of political and/or cultural normativity in more recent (post 1990) horror films warrants more anxiety about the genre as an academic/critical subject. While the earlier films (roughly 1968 to 1990) certainly tested the audience‟s tolerance for varying degrees of gore, they also produced a horror landscape filled with the abject/ed objects of capitalist, (hetero)normative, enlightenment and humanist idealism. The later films seem often to focus upon gore explicitly or even exclusively as the site of horror. Is the abjected body, the body in pieces as disarticulated and corrupted matter, the thing around which horror composes itself? Barbara Creed notes that typical viewer responses to these films are often expressions of (excremental) voiding (“it scared the shit out of me” or “it made me feel sick”), and that these responses are part and parcel of the viewers‟ pleasure and expectations.(3). In the face of the 2 latest batch of gore-nographic “neo-slashers”, remakes, reboots and revisionings of post modern horror, Carrol‟s question remains an important one: what is it that horror films do? How does post-modern horror (re)articulate some cultural need for an experience with the abject? And while Creed is certainly correct in noting that horror film viewers want to be made to feel shitless or nauseous, what brings about both the desire for and experience of abject horror? In concert with the physical experience of the post modern horror film is an experience with a particular kind of post modern terror, one which manipulates both its audiences‟ desire for voiding, for being voided, and presents as agent for that voiding, the post-modern monster. Like its predecessors, the post modern monster is protean; however, unlike the monsters of classic horror, the post modern monster and the films that produce it won‟t die off. The repetitive logic of the films and the monsters that subtend the genre (the casts of victims change with each film while the monster always returns—no monster no franchise) certainly indicate a seemingly infinite capacity for reproduction of a particular film experience, and yet much of the repetitive logic places an emphasis on repetition and not logic. The means by which the monstrous is enabled to re-terrorize become increasingly fantastic or simplistic over time. The acts of terrorization are mindlessly generic. Perhaps then it is not, as some critical theories contend, the (il)logic present in the genre as a whole, or the particular logic of post modern (re)gendering of the (Final Girl) hero/survivor or the destructive glee largely male, adolescent audiences enjoy while watching the world of parental authority deconstruct, that warrant the genre‟s continued presence in cultural and academic interest. Perhaps instead it is the specific traumatic presence of the post modern monster as a queer space that reveals the real which creates and sustains our desire. One of the most notable differences in classic as opposed to post modern horror is that between the post-modern monster and the classic horror film monster. Classic horror presented a 3 monster that represented an encounter with the “other”—ideologically derived and produced anxieties about the culturally/sexually ill- or non-conformed threat to heteronormative, enlightenment, sanctioned order. Typically, the monster was understandable; it had a constitutive quality, an identity as “other,” that through humanistic and/or scientific interrogation could be vanquished or at least contained. Robin Wood has noted that the function of the monster in classic horror was to enable an encounter with that other, and often to secure a humanistic recuperation of the monster as well as a return to (capitalist, family centered, paternalistic, and heterosexual) normalcy (“The American Nightmare; Horror in the 70s”). The monster as some expression of repressed identity or disavowed potential (the Frankenstein monster for example with its pathetic challenge to humanistic ideals) produced a chance for understanding and pity, but only after the threat was destroyed. The destruction of the monstrous, after ascertaining its nature and desires, led to a more informed, more humanized, human subject. The threat that the monster represented was often created through some hubris or carelessness on the part of humanity. The monster of classic horror offered the human subject a space for redress and redemption. While the post modern monster may be made manifest through human lack or culpability, the possibility for exoneration or understanding is foreclosed. The monster‟s queerness resides in its constitutive negation of meaning and knowledge. The knowledge gathered about the post modern monster‟s presence is always inadequate or superfluous. Michael Myer‟s past crime may be part of an historical record, but the reason for that crime and the murderous desires that inhere in him as monster are outside of human understanding or capacity to deflect further murderousness. As such, the unknown-ness that constitutes the monster represents an un-chartable and uncharted territory—a dark continent of desire and drive. The post modern monster queers the classic horror film monstrous; rather than 4 representing a space of humanistic dialectic (human error, monstrous result and human enlightenment/progress through mastery of the monstrous) the post modern monstrous reveals the tenuous nature of the subject, its frailty and corruptibility, and it disallows any recuperation of the subject back into a space of productive futurity. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman identifies the function of queer as that which “comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance...to every social structure or form” (4). The non- closure of the genre‟s narratives, the survival of the monstrous and the monster, produces both the inadequacy of the symbolic law to contain the monster and the continued presence of the monster as affront to and contestation of that law. Not only do the human subjects not profit from their encounter with the monster, the threat to the law and human survival remains present. Certainly, it is this outlaw positionality that marks both the classic horror film monster and the post modern horror film monster. However, the classic horror film monster produces through its monstrousness the triumph of the law; the post modern monster eludes and confounds the law.